[On his part of helping to change Las Vegas] Vegas wasn’t really the place where you really got lit up on vacation. And I thought boy, why not bring the ideas and the feelings and the dynamics of other places to bear?
Steve Wynn

[On coming up with the vision for the Mirage Casino] One night I was watching Johnny Carson, and Neil Simon was on and I think Doc Simon was plugging ‘California Suite’ or something like that. Johnny says to Doc Simon ‘Well, how to you do it? How do you make the comedy? And Neil Simon says… ‘Well Johnny, I look for conflict. That’s where the humor comes from.’ And the next day I just bought the property from [Howard] Hughes and I went out to the Sands Hotel, and parked my little Mercedes. And I got out of the car, and sat on the front hood of the car, cause they let me park by the curb. And I was looking at the land I had bought, and I said ‘Conflict’. I was thinking of Neil Simon, and then an idea came into my mind, an image of Josh Logan the director, doing ‘South Pacific’ and I heard Juanita Hall’s voice, singing ‘Bally Hine’… And I said to myself, ‘Suppose that, what you see with your eyes, is not what your brain tells you should be there?’ Where in the harsh southern of outer desert, suppose you saw Polynesia, South Pacific, wouldn’t that make people say ‘Could the inside of this place be as cool as the outside and that would provoke them to go in. And that’s how the volcano and the Mirage notion came. I remember, looking back on it that first I had an idea of conflict to provoke people and to engage their curiosity, and ever since then, every time that I been faced with one of these projects, I say to myself quietly, before anything else, first let’s try and get our arms around an idea, and then we’ll get the stuff.
Steve Wynn

[On opening one of his new casinos] This is my favorite time. When we start designing this place, like all these hotels it was four or five years ago. Some of the decisions were made a long time ago and you forget and then when all the scaffolding comes down, and the bandages come off, and it’s cleaned up… The kids are in here having practice, like now and the place is alive, it’s almost as if you see it for the first time, even if you designed it yourself with your friends.
Steve Wynn